Days Like This

by Laurie Breton

  A little past ten, Paige went to her room and shut the door. Casey paced the floor, her anxiety growing with each tick of the clock. Where the hell was he? Off the road in some ravine, where he wouldn’t be found until morning? Sitting at the Jackson Diner over a cup of lukewarm coffee with too much sugar in it? Driving aimlessly, because this was Jackson Falls on a snowy November night, and even the bowling alley was shut down? Where on earth would he go in this one-stoplight town?

  Then it clicked. Six months after Danny died, she’d had a huge fight with Rob. They’d said awful things to each other, and she’d thrown him out of her house and told him not to darken her door again. Of course, being Rob, he’d come hammering at her door early the next morning, just in time for a cup of the coffee that she, being Casey, had made in anticipation of his arrival. He’d spent a mostly sleepless night on Jesse Lindstrom’s couch.

  The same Jesse who was now married to his sister.

  Casey snatched up the phone and dialed the number. Her sister-in-law picked up on the third ring. “I’m sorry to call so late,” she began, “but—”

  “He’s here,” Rose said. “He’s been here for three hours. Jesse and his friend Jim Beam are trying to peel him off the ceiling. What the hell happened?”

  A solid wave of relief poured over her, and her knotted insides relaxed a little. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I came home from town and the minute I walked through the door, he went into meltdown mode, and—oh, God.” Her voice broke. “I’ve been so scared. I was afraid he’d gone off the road in the snow. I imagined all kinds of horrible things.”

  “You can stop panicking. He’s right here with us, and we’ll keep him until it’s safe for him to drive. You might as well go on to bed. Once he calms down, I’ll point him in the direction of home.” Rose hesitated. “Just be forewarned: it could be a while.”

  “That bad? Still?”

  “That bad. I honestly don’t believe I’ve ever seen my baby brother quite this wound up.”

  “I’m sorry, Rose. I’m so sorry to get you involved in this mess.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been dealing with his messes since birth. Get yourself some sleep, and we’ll talk in the morning.”

  ***

  She awoke with her vision blurry and her head grainy. The room was still dark, and her husband was sitting on the edge of the bed with his head cradled in his arms. For an instant, her heart stuttered and scrambled around inside her chest. She rolled onto her side and reached out a trembling hand to touch the small of his back. He stiffened. “Hey,” she whispered.

  He raised his head. Without looking at her, he said, “Hey.”

  “I wasn’t sure you were coming back.”

  He let out a soft sound, halfway between a sob and a snort. “Neither was I.”

  She ran her fingertips up his spine, between his rigid shoulder blades and back down, and he exhaled sharply. “When I left here,” he said, “I kept asking myself what the hell I was doing, leaving you like that. But I was hurt, and scared, and pissed off. And a little crazy. I wanted to get away from you. I wanted to hurt you the way you were hurting me. I wanted to grab you by the wrists and shake some sense into you. I wanted to strip you naked and throw you down on the bed and make you forget he ever existed. I wanted to turn my back on you, say fuck you, and never see you again.”

  The hard muscles of his back refused to yield to her stroking fingers. “But it didn’t take me long to figure out that no matter what I try or where I go, I can’t do it. I can’t get you out of my head. You’ve been there for too long.” He finally turned and looked at her. “We’re too embedded in each other to separate the strands. Almost two decades. Casey and Rob. Rob and Casey. Who the hell knows where you end and I begin?”

  A flicker of pain licked and darted around her heart. “I know you love me,” he said. “We’ve loved each other for so long, I can’t begin to know where or when it all started. But, you see, the problem is, you love him, too. You’re still not over him. I’m not sure you ever will be. And I just don’t know where to put that any longer.”

  “You’re so wrong,” she said.

  “I know it should be enough, knowing that you love me. But it’s not. Because no matter what I do, no matter how much time passes, you’ll never love me the way you love him. I just can’t compete. I’m fighting a losing battle with a ghost. And maybe I could live with that, except for that one little inescapable truth that keeps me awake at night: If he was above ground, we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation.”

  She got up from the bed so abruptly that the mattress rocked, strode naked across the room, and took her robe from a hook on the bedroom door. She pulled it on, tied the belt, and spun to face him. “You’re an idiot,” she said. “A complete and utter cretin, and I can’t believe I have to explain any of this to you. But it doesn’t look like you’ll be pulling your head out of your ass anytime soon, MacKenzie, so we are going to have this out, here and now, and be done with it.”

  He didn’t respond, just sat with his elbows resting on his knees, those green eyes unreadable.

  “I am so damn furious with you! How could you do that to me? Knowing how Danny died, and what it did to me afterward—what it’s still doing to me—how could you drive away from me like that, in a blinding snowstorm, mad as hell, and then not come home, and not call, and leave me spending hours wondering whether you’d gone off the road and were dead in a ditch somewhere?”

  “I figured you wouldn’t even notice I was gone. The way you keep wallowing in your misery—”

  “That’s bullshit, MacKenzie! Do you hear me? Absolute and utter rubbish! I am not wallowing, and if you’d bothered to let me get a word in edgewise, maybe you would’ve figured that out. In case you hadn’t heard, there’s this little thing called closure—”

  “Something you should’ve gotten a long time ago, sweetheart! That train should have already left the station.”

  “Oh, for the love of God. How can you be this stupid and still walk upright? You are one hard-headed jackass, and I cannot imagine what I ever saw in you. That train has not left yet, not for either of us, if you want the God’s honest truth. So you—” She moved closer, poked him hard in the chest with her forefinger. “—can just get down off your high horse and stop acting like a two-year-old.”

  “I’m not the one acting like a two-year-old! And stop poking me. If you’re that mystified about what you ever saw in me, maybe it’s time to rethink this whole damn marriage thing!”

  “Oh, that’s just priceless! We have something really good going here, and you’re determined to tank it! Well, guess what?” She poked him again, hard. “I’m not letting you get away with it! Do you hear me? You may have managed to screw up your other marriages, but you’re not screwing up this one. Because I won’t allow it!”

  He rose to his feet and loomed over her. “Goddamn it, stop poking me!”

  “You’re damn lucky that’s all I’m doing, because I am so furious with you right now that I’d like to hit you!”

  He squared his jaw. Braced his feet apart in a combative stance. “Go ahead. Hit me. I’m a big boy. I have broad shoulders.”

  “Don’t tempt me, Flash. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I’m done playing second fiddle!” he bellowed. “That’s what the hell is wrong with me! I’m over it, do you hear? I did it for too long, and I. AM. DONE! I’m not standing behind any man, dead or alive, ever again. If you can’t deal with that, too bad! Because that’s the way it’ll be from here on in. Starting right now!”

  “Is there something fundamentally wrong with you, MacKenzie? Something that makes you look right through me and see what you want to see, instead of what’s really there? Because I can’t come up with any other explanation for how you could possibly spend more than five minutes in the same room with me and not realize that I am absolutely, utterly, batshit crazy in love with you!”

  He opened his mouth to speak. Closed it
as her words gradually sank in. Still furious, she said, “Of course I don’t love you the way I loved him. I was a child when I fell in love with him! What you and I have is so much bigger, so much more than what I had with him, that they’re not even in the same ballpark. All those years, I believed he was the love of my life. But I was wrong. It wasn’t him. It was you. I’ve never felt this way about anybody. Are you hearing me? Never. How can you possibly not know how I feel about you? How can you possibly not feel it when I touch you? When we dance together in the dark? Or when we make love? Especially when we make love? How can you not know that you’re the reason I get up every morning?”

  “You haven’t exactly—”

  “Shut up. It was a rhetorical question, and I’m nowhere near done talking. I suppose I shouldn’t blame you for not knowing, when I wasn’t even fully aware of it myself. But you’re so damn smart about everything else that I can’t understand how you can be the village idiot when it comes to relationships. Of course he still holds a piece of my heart! He always will. That eighteen-year-old girl is still inside me somewhere, and when I’m ninety she’ll still be there. She loved him at eighteen, and she’ll love him at ninety. I can’t help it, I can’t change it, it’s just the way it is. You’ll have to learn to accept it if there’s any hope at all of us making this marriage work.”

  “Good to know.”

  “I told you to shut up! When I’m done having my say, then you can make your editorial comments.”

  He scowled, but kept his mouth shut.

  “The problem, you idiot, is that you have it backwards. It’s not that I don’t love you the same way I loved him. It’s that I never loved him the way I love you.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that he was a fantasy. A young girl’s dream of what love was supposed to be. But you, MacKenzie—you’re the real deal. And you own my heart, all but that tiny sliver that will always belong to him. You hold it in the palm of your hand, and with one wrong move, you could crush it.”

  “Yet you keep going back there. To the cemetery. To him. Do you have any idea what that does to me? Every frigging time?”

  “I do. And that’s why I went there last night. To give him the cufflink. To tell him I wouldn’t be coming back again, because I’m your wife now, and every time I go there, it feels like I’m cheating on you. And I’m so tired of hurting you.”

  “Yeah, well, that makes two of us.”

  “Stop it! Do you truly have no idea what you are to me? You’re my best friend, my lover, my partner. You’re my foundation, my Gibraltar, and my soft place to fall. My playmate, my eye candy, and my sex toy. My teacher, my conscience, and the voice inside my head that makes me want to be a better person. My entire adult life is tangled up with yours, and like you said, we’ve been together for too long to untangle all those threads and figure out which of them belong to which of us. It doesn’t even matter any more.

  “And you know what the sad thing is? It took me almost two decades to figure this out, but it’s so clear to me now that I can’t believe I missed it. All those years I spent trying to fix him, trying to make him into the husband I was so sure he could be, it was you—” She paused, took a breath. “You who played the role of husband. All that time, while I was blind to everything but him, you were standing right beside me, doing all the husbandly things he should have done for me but couldn’t ever seem to get right. You’re the one I should have been with. And I’m doing my damnedest to make up for all that lost time now that I’ve finally figured it out. But you’re making it really difficult, you rock-headed baboon!”

  “I’m not a mind reader. I don’t suppose it might’ve occurred to you at any point in—oh, let’s say the last year and a half—to tell me any of this?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not perfect. Far from it. I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants with this marriage. So afraid I’d get it wrong, and I’d end up losing you. And I’ve learned a few things recently, things I should have realized all along, but maybe you’re not the only one who’s hard-headed.”

  He squared his jaw. “What things?”

  “How about this, just for starters? When I took him back after Nassau, he wasn’t the man I wanted to be with. You were. Although right now, I can’t for the life of me remember why!”

  “Yet you went back to him. I must be really dense, because I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I, damn it! I thought I was doing the right thing. Until the moment you got in that taxi and I watched you drive away, and I lost the ability to breathe. I wanted to run after you and beg you to come back. But it was too late. So I went upstairs and sat on the couch and cried instead.”

  “It wasn’t too late! It was never too late! You knew where I was headed. You could’ve called me. You could have hopped in your damn car and driven to South Boston and dragged me back. I wouldn’t have needed all that much convincing!”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why the bloody hell not?”

  “I’d made my decision. I’d already made a commitment to him. How could I—”

  “There’s this little invention called the telephone. You could have called him and told him you’d changed your mind. Big boy that he was, he would’ve survived it.”

  “He was my husband!”

  “And that says it all, doesn’t it, cupcake?”

  “No, damn it. It doesn’t. Because I wasn’t in love with him anymore. I was in love with you!”

  “I—” He stopped abruptly, clamped his mouth shut, squared his jaw. “Me?” he said.

  “Surprised, are you? So was I when I finally figured it out.” She took a breath. “Damn it, Rob, I thought I knew what I was getting into when I married you. I thought I knew what it would be like to be your wife. I thought I knew how I felt about you. But the truth is that I had no idea. I had no idea how deep my feelings for you ran. Once I figured it out, it scared me to death.”

  “I don’t understand. Why?”

  “Because he swallowed me alive! I couldn’t let that happen again!”

  “Jesus H. Christ.” He spun away from her, walked to the window, turned and leaned his lanky hips against the frame. Folded his arms and crossed his ankles. Furiously, he said, “Did you really think I’d ever let that happen to you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly.” She closed her eyes, sighed. Opened them again. Wearily, she said, “And of course, there’s the sex.”

  With the fingers of one hand, he slowly rubbed his temple. “You have a problem with that, too?”

  “Are you crazy? The sex is amazing. Beyond amazing. I understand that women are supposed to reach their sexual peak in their thirties, but I had no idea it would be like this. And if I’m running right on schedule, what kind of mutant does that make you? You were supposed to reach your peak two decades ago. If you’re like this at thirty-seven, what were you like at nineteen? It’s a good thing we didn’t get together until we were in our thirties, because if you’d come at me, back when I was an innocent eighteen-year-old kid, with that out-of-control-locomotive-racing-down-a-mountainside-without-brakes thing you have going on, I would’ve run screaming in the opposite direction. You would have scared me to death.”

  He stared at her, raised both eyebrows. “So now you’re scared of me?”

  “Of course not. Are you even listening to me? For the love of God, MacKenzie, try to follow the little red bouncing ball. It’s really not that difficult. Look, I realize I don’t have the worldly experience you’ve gleaned from your exhaustive research. I’ve only been with one other man. But I was married for a long time, and I’m sorry if this makes you squeamish, but I did have a sex life. A pretty good one. Or so I thought. But sex with you—it’s like a freaking trip to Disneyland, where I get to eat all the cotton candy I want, and go on every one of the rides. Some of them more than once, if you get my drift. You’re like this giant candy store, and I’m standing in the window, trying to decide if I want
one of these or three of those, or maybe six of that pretty one over there. This is all your fault! You’ve done this to me. I’ve never been a lustful woman. I’ve always been so proper, so—”

  “Prudish?”

  “Your word, MacKenzie, not mine! Ladylike is what I was going for. I was raised to be a nice girl. But I don’t feel like a lady anymore. It’s as though you’ve poured some kind of magic love potion over me. I don’t even know who I am anymore. I don’t know what happened to the me I used to be. I look in the mirror and I don’t recognize myself. Instead of that nice girl I used to be, I see this bawdy, earthy, hot-blooded, carnal woman. A floozy. I don’t know what that’s all about. And the scariest thing is that I don’t want to go back. I like the new me. I don’t want to be a nice girl. I like being a floozy!”

  He was looking at her bemusedly, with one eyebrow raised, but she was on a roll, and couldn’t stop now. “And I swore I’d never tell you this, because it’s so embarrassing, and not becoming in a woman of my age—”

  “You’re thirty-five years old, Fiore. Not exactly geriatric.”

  “Shut up. Since I’ve gotten this far, I might as well go for the gold. I think you are the hottest, sexiest, most gorgeous man on the planet. And every time I see you barefoot and shirtless, wearing nothing but a tight pair of jeans, I dissolve into this hot puddle of lust.” She paused for breath, raked her damp hair away from her face. “And when you talk dirty to me—” She flushed hot from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair, and buried her face in her hands. “I can’t believe I’m saying this to you. But I’m just going to say it and then I’ll crawl away and die of mortification. When we’re alone in the dark…and you’re inside me…and things are getting hot and heavy…and you talk dirty to me…I go off like a bottle rocket.”